… as Mrs Potts sings, and I’m talking here specifically about the venerable tendency of some units of some universities to conceive themselves – not evolve into, but define themselves from the word go – as handmaidens to commerce. To put it genteelly.
They’re not made up of researchers with established interests. They’re made up of people who look around at government and industry and say Whaddaya want us to say?
Medicine and economics are the most likely places to find these generators of client-friendly research, but almost any part of the university might harbor them. SUNY Buffalo for instance recently sort of magically generated this new institute, the Shale Resources and Society Institute, “without consultation with the faculty senate or … putting an advisory board in place.” The hastily assembled Shale and Society specializes in producing fracking is beautiful research – and, since this research comes out of a respectable university, the fracking industry waves it about and insists on its legitimacy.
Some SUNY faculty members are unhappy about this. One of them says: “We should make sure that our research efforts don’t look like industry public relations efforts.”
June 13th, 2012 at 8:16AM
[…] see Fracking Research and the Money that Flows to it(NYT June 12) and University Diaries, which notes “the venerable tendency of some units of some universities to … To put it genteelly.They’re not made up of researchers with established interests. They’re made […]